Covid-19 Live Updates: Treatment That Trump Called a ‘Cure’ Was Tested With Cells Derived From Fetal Tissue

President Trump released another video message on Thursday, promising to make the experimental treatment that he received for Covid-19 “available immediately” and “all free.”

Mr. Trump addressed the video, which was taped outside the White House and posted on Twitter, to senior citizens, whom he called “my favorite people in the world.”

Repeating a claim he made yesterday, the president referred to a treatment, which he did not name, as a “cure.” There is no known cure yet for the coronavirus.

Mr. Trump appeared to be referring to an antibody treatment being developed by the drug company Regeneron, which he received on an emergency basis on Friday. That treatment, which was developed with cells originally derived from fetal tissue, is still in late-stage clinical trials. Although early data has been promising, experts have said there is no way to know whether it helped Mr. Trump. He also received other treatments while he was at Walter Reed National Military Health Center.

Mr. Trump also repeated a suggestion that treatments could soon be authorized by the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use. He did not offer an explanation for how he would make the medication free or how he intended to “get it to you soon.” However, Regeneron has received over $500 million from the federal government to develop and manufacture its antibody therapy, and as part of that deal, has said it would be made available at no cost to Americans.

On Wednesday, Regeneron said that it had applied for emergency authorization of its treatments, and said it had enough doses for 50,000 patients, and would have enough for up to 300,000 people by the end of the year.

“We’re taking care of our seniors — you’re not vulnerable, but they like to say ‘the vulnerable,’ but you’re the least vulnerable,” the president said. “But for this one thing you are vulnerable, and so am I.”

Polling suggests that Mr. Trump is struggling to win over seniors, who make up a crucial voting bloc for Republicans. Although he led Hillary Clinton by five points among the cohort in 2016, several polls this week show the president trailing Joe Biden among seniors by at least 20 points.

The president also repeated calls to hold China responsible for the pandemic. “We are making tremendous progress with this horrible disease that was sent over by China,” he said. “China will pay a big price for what they did to the world and us.”

Global roundup

Defiance of coronavirus rules in rural India is propelling the nation’s virus caseload toward the No. 1 spot globally. Infections are rippling into every corner of this country of 1.3 billion people. The Indian news media is calling it “The Rural Surge.”

In the Indian megacities where the pandemic first hit, vigorous public awareness campaigns have left the populace mostly on guard. But when it comes to government efforts to contain the virus, rural India is resisting.

In many villages, no one is wearing masks. There is no social distancing. People are refusing to get tested and they are hiding their sick. Many believe the government is overstating the severity of the pandemic and showing no sensitivity to the economic hardship that they are suffering.

That dynamic has helped India catch up with the United States in terms of total infections. U.S. cases are near 7.6 million, compared with India’s 6.8 million, according to a New York Times database. But India outpaces new American cases by 30,000 or so each day, putting it on a path to potentially surpass the United States in the coming weeks.

Officials say India’s caseload is rising because nearly one million tests are being performed each day, five times the number a few months ago. They also point to India’s relatively low death rate, about an eighth or ninth of those of the United States, Spain, Brazil and Britain.

Scientists say this is mainly because India’s population is younger and leaner, though they caution that most deaths in India, from any cause, are not investigated. And India’s deaths are steadily ticking up, by about 1,000 a day, now totaling about 105,000.

In other developments around the world:

• On Wednesday, Brazil passed the five million case mark. The milestone came as the spread of the virus has been slowing down for over a month — an achievement many public health experts believe has little to do with the government’s handling of the crisis, but rather how thoroughly the virus has ravaged the country. In the city of Manaus, in the state of Amazonas, one of the most severely hit by the virus, the number of cases began to increase, especially among young people, in recent weeks.

• The United Nations official overseeing the organization’s refugee relief operations is self-isolating after having tested positive for the coronavirus. Filippo Grandi, the high commissioner for refugees, disclosed his diagnosis in a Twitter post on Wednesday, saying he had mild symptoms and hoped to recover soon. Mr. Grandi, 63, had in recent weeks traveled to Brussels, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Stéphane Dujarric, the U.N. spokesman, told reporters on Thursday that “all close contacts were informed about the High Commissioner’s situation” and that seven of them are also self-isolating.

• The British government is considering a tiered system that would tighten restrictions on pubs and restaurants in the areas of England with the highest rates of infection, according to the BBC and other media outlets. A ban on overnight stays away from home could also be introduced for the worst-affected areas, but schools would remain open. Despite local lockdowns in several cities in the north of England, the country’s coronavirus caseload has continued to increase, with Britain reporting an average of 13,000 new cases a day over the past week.

• The European Union signed a deal with Gilead, the California-based pharmaceutical company, to ensure uninterrupted access to an antiviral drug being used to treat Covid-19. Veklury, also known as remdesivir, has been authorized by more than 50 countries, including the United States and in Europe, for the treatment of Covid-19 patients needing supplemental oxygen. The deal signed between Gilead and the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, would allow all members of the European Union, as well as the United Kingdom, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and several Balkan countries to buy up to 500,000 treatment courses in the next six months.

• In Germany, the head of the federal institute responsible for tracking the coronavirus warned on Thursday that the country could soon see an “uncontrolled” spread of the virus. “It is possible that we see more than 10,000 new cases per day,” the official, Lothar Wieler, who leads the Robert Koch Institute, said at a news conference. Germany recorded at least 4,000 new daily cases on Wednesday and has a daily average of at least 2,600 new cases over the past week, according to a New York Times database.

• Hong Kong’s health secretary, Sophia Chan, said Thursday that the city was considering legal options for mandatory testing as it prepared for a new wave of coronavirus infections. She noted that research by the University of Hong Kong showed the rate of the spread was increasing once again. On Thursday, Hong Kong reported 18 new coronavirus cases, 14 of which were locally transmitted.

• Madrid’s highest regional court on Thursday annulled a lockdown imposed by Spain’s central government on the capital region. The court said that the central government did not have jurisdiction to institute restrictions that affected fundamental rights and the freedom of movement. The ruling is a major setback for the central government, and underlines both the political tensions and legal uncertainty in Spain over how to respond to the latest wave of virus cases.

• Swedes pay some of the highest taxes on earth in exchange for extensive government services, including state-furnished health care. Yet among the nearly 6,000 people whose deaths have been linked to the coronavirus in Sweden, 2,694, or more than 45 percent, were among the country’s most vulnerable citizens — those living in nursing homes. It is in part the story of how Sweden’s famously generous social safety net has been eroding.

The El Paso Health Department reported 523 new cases of Covid-19 on Thursday, a record for the West Texas city. The city also reported four deaths.

There are 4,929 active cases of the coronavirus in El Paso, the sixth-largest city in Texas. After declining in early August, cases began spiking dramatically in mid-September.

“We are deeply concerned with the current rising trends we are experiencing on number of positive cases, hospitalizations and deaths due to COVID-19,” Dr. Hector Ocaranza of the El Paso Health Authority said in a news release on Thursday.

A New York Times analysis in July of mask-wearing patterns across the United States found that mask-wearing rates were high in El Paso at the time. The city’s mayor, Dee Margo, a Republican, has made a point of wearing a mask in public, and the city enacted a mask mandate in June.

But the news release on Thursday cited “virus fatigue” as a probable cause for the spike, and urged residents to remain vigilant in taking precautions, and isolating after a diagnosis.

“Without a vaccine or medication to cure the disease,” Dr. Ocaranza said, “it’s up to each and every one of us to stop the spread of disease.”

A day earlier, Bishop Mark Seitz of the Catholic Diocese of El Paso announced that he had tested positive for the virus. The bishop said that he had no symptoms, and that he would self-isolate for the 10 days.

The French authorities are tightening virus restrictions in a growing number of big cities as cases rise and hospitals come under increasing strain.

The Paris and Marseille regions have already been placed on the country’s highest alert level, which requires the closure of all bars, gyms and clubs for at least two weeks. Classrooms and universities are limited to half capacity and restaurants can only remain open if they follow a strict health protocol.

“Unfortunately, the health situation continues to deteriorate in France,” Olivier Véran, France’s health minister, said on Thursday as he announced that four cities — Lille, Grenoble, Lyon and Saint-Etienne — also would be placed on maximum alert as of Saturday.

France is bracing itself for a return to restrictions that were put into place when the virus first hit the country, although there have been protests against the idea in the south of the country. According to a survey published on Sept. 26 by IFOP, one of France’s leading polling firms, 72 percent of French citizens would be in favor of a new, nationwide lockdown.

France reported a record daily count of more than 18,700 new cases on Wednesday, according to a Times database, and Covid-19 patients now occupy a quarter of intensive care unit beds nationwide, said Aurélien Rousseau, the head of the health authority for the Paris region.

In total, there have been nearly 654,00 coronavirus cases in France, and almost 32,500 people have died, the Times database shows.

On Thursday, hospitals in the Paris region activated emergency measures that were used previously in March and April to cope with an influx of patients. The efforts involved postponing non-urgent surgeries and calling staff members back from leave.

Rousseau said that enacting such measures was “an important decision” that “means that we are going to face a very strong wave, and that we have to put all forces into the battle.”

Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, hosted his daughter’s Atlanta wedding indoors in defiance of state and municipal guidelines that at the time limited gatherings to 10 people or less.

The wedding, held at Atlanta’s Biltmore Ballrooms in May, was first reported Thursday by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It took place early in the coronavirus pandemic, as Americans were canceling or postponing their own weddings and other long-planned gatherings to comply with public health restrictions aimed at slowing the spread of the virus.

Photographs from the May 31 event, posted online, show no masks or distancing among the crowd of several dozen tuxedo-clad attendees.

In one image, Mr. Meadows can be seen delivering a father-of-the-bride speech before a band with at least eight members. Another shows a 21-member wedding party posing with the newly married couple. Mr. Meadows and his wife, Debbie, are shown during the recessional walking together down a flower petal-strewn aisle while 50 people seated closely together watch.

Mr. Meadows declined to comment on the wedding.

Mike Moon, a photographer for Ember Studio, which photographed the event, said during an interview Thursday that people who worked to put the wedding on wore masks but most of the guests did not. Matt Trivett, who owns Ember Studio, said he did not wish to comment about whether he and his staff felt safe at the event.

“Vendors wore masks and so did some of the guests off and on when they wanted to,” Mr. Moon said.

Other photographs show Mr. Meadows dancing with his daughter, Haley, various groomsmen shaking hands and much dancing and mingling. The event would not have appeared out of the ordinary in pre-pandemic times.

None of the photographs posted in the online wedding album show any guests wearing masks.

More than 7,000 Georgians have died from the coronavirus. The death toll nationwide is now more than 212,000.

Mr. Meadows has overseen a White House staff that in recent weeks has become a hot spot for the virus. President Trump was given supplemental oxygen and hospitalized last weekend, and more than 20 other high-ranking administration officials, top campaign aides and Republican senators who have attended White House events have tested positive in the last two weeks.

During a mid-September briefing with reporters outside the White House, Mr. Meadows suggested there was little use in wearing masks — a position at odds with the administration’s own public health guidance.

“If masks is the panacea for everything,” Mr. Meadows said, “if that’s the way that we open back our economy and get everybody back to work, I will gladly wear my mask each and every day if that’s what makes the difference. And it doesn’t.”

Mr. Trump also has ignored public health guidance on masks and gatherings, continuing to hold large rallies with supporters crammed together during the pandemic. Most of these events have been outdoors, though he also held an indoor arena rally in June in Tulsa, Okla., that officials later said was the likely the source of a local outbreak of the virus.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

Across the country, millions of first-year students are arriving on college campuses during a pandemic. That means classes conducted mostly online, dinners in dorm rooms and difficulty getting to know professors and peers. Some look forward to fleeting moments to be with others, like elevator rides. Others force themselves to take walks to be sure they see sunlight.

Among them is Elle Fleenor, who hunkered down for two weeks of quarantine when she arrived on the campus of Butler University in Indianapolis. She attended orientation and lectures on Zoom, picked up food from the dining hall to eat in her room and barely interacted with anyone beyond her dorm building’s walls.

Ms. Fleenor, a first-year student from Scottsburg, Ind., knew she wouldn’t have the college experience she had imagined. But she wasn’t prepared for how the precautions her school was taking to slow the spread of the coronavirus would complicate her efforts to make friends, and how isolated that would make her feel.

“It’s been very hard, very lonesome,” Ms. Fleenor said. “As a freshman, being hit with all this is extremely difficult.”

The first semester of college is challenging even in normal times, as students get used to being away from home, their families and lifelong friends. This year, psychologists and other experts fear that the necessary precautions taken by colleges and universities, many of them coronavirus hot spots, will increase the loneliness and isolation.

“We’re receiving recommendations and restrictions aimed at limiting the spread of the virus that also limit our ability to connect with others,” said Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University.

The state of Hawaii is preparing to loosen some of the strict pandemic restrictions that have hammered its tourism industry, including the requirement that arriving travelers spend 14 days in quarantine.

Starting on Oct. 15, travelers will be allowed to skip the quarantine if they can show a negative virus test result from an approved source, taken no more than 72 hours before arrival. The pre-travel testing program had been set to begin over the summer, but was postponed when the virus surged on the islands.

Travelers who do not want to be tested can still opt to quarantine instead, raising concerns that untested travelers could infect tested passengers on flights to the islands.

A negative test is not a guarantee of lack of infection: It can take several days after exposure for the amount of virus in an infected person’s body to rise high enough to produce a positive result. The state said it would randomly test 10 percent of incoming passengers four days after arrival to assess the plan’s effectiveness.

Hawaii has reported more than 13,000 cases of the virus, and more than 160 deaths, according to a New York Times database. The state will continue to require wearing a mask in public, and some inter-island travel will remain restricted.

The new measures are meant to help revive the state’s tourism industry, which makes up about a quarter of its economy. The Hawaii Tourism Authority reported in August that travel to the islands the previous month was down almost 98 percent compared with the same month in 2019.

“It’s important that people know we welcome them as long as they’ve gotten their test,” Lt. Gov. Josh Green told The Associated Press. Mr. Green, an emergency room doctor, is heading the new testing program. He recently recovered from Covid-19.

President Trump on Thursday said he would not participate in a virtual debate, speaking on Fox Business Network minutes after the Commission on Presidential Debates announced that the next debate would be virtual because of virus concerns.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden were scheduled to debate on the same stage in Miami on Oct. 15, but the commission is now preparing for the candidates and moderators to appear remotely.

Mr. Trump, who tested positive for the virus last week, has said he planned to go to the debate, even as health experts say he may not be fully recovered from Covid-19. Mr. Biden has said he would not debate Mr. Trump in Miami if the president was still infected.

“The second presidential debate will take the form of a town meeting, in which the candidates would participate from separate remote locations,” the commission said in a statement, citing “the health and safety of all involved.”

But Mr. Trump immediately dismissed the concept in a television interview on Thursday morning, saying: “I’m not going to waste my time on a virtual debate, that’s not what debating is all about. You sit behind a computer and do a debate — it’s ridiculous.”

“That’s not acceptable to us,” Mr. Trump told the anchor Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business of the virtual debate format. “I’m not going to do a virtual debate.”

Mr. Trump said he only learned of the debate commission’s decision on Thursday morning, minutes before he got on the phone for an interview. He accused the commission of “trying to protect Biden.”

“For the swamp creatures at the Presidential Debate Commission to now rush to Joe Biden’s defense by unilaterally canceling an in-person debate is pathetic,” Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, said in a statement on Thursday. “Here are the facts: President Trump will have posted multiple negative tests prior to the debate, so there is no need for this unilateral declaration.”

Mr. Stepien’s claim about Mr. Trump testing positive over the next week is unsubstantiated, because the virus is notoriously unpredictable.

Mr. Biden’s campaign issued a more receptive statement on Thursday. “Vice President Biden looks forward to speaking directly to the American people,” said Kate Bedingfield, a Biden deputy campaign manager.

The moderator, Steve Scully of C-SPAN, will still conduct the proceedings from Miami at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, the commission said.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases, said that President Trump might be right that the experimental treatment he received and promoted has helped him in his fight with Covid-19 — but that his case alone doesn’t prove it.

“I think it’s a reasonably good chance that the antibody that he received, the Regeneron antibody, made a significant difference in a positive way in his course,” Dr. Fauci, who is not involved in the president’s care, said on Thursday during an interview on MSNBC.

He pushed back against Mr. Trump’s claim that the treatment has now been shown to be a “cure” for the disease, which has killed more than 210,000 Americans so far.

“When you have only one, you can’t make the determination that that’s a cure,” he said. “You have to do a clinical trial involving a large number of individuals, compared either to a placebo or another intervention.”

The manufacturer, Regeneron, has applied to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency approval of the experimental treatment, a cocktail of monoclonal antibodies.

Mr. Trumped received the Regeneron cocktail on Friday after he announced that he had tested positive for coronavirus. He has also received other treatments that are used for patients with severe cases of Covid-19, including remdesivir and dexamethasone.

In a five-minute video on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said that it was a “blessing from God” that he had been infected with the coronavirus and that the Regeneron cocktail had suddenly made him feel better. “I felt unbelievable,” he said. “I felt good immediately.”

The president said he would make sure that hundreds of thousands of doses would be available to Americans soon, free of charge, and he gave the impression that he would push the F.D.A. to approve the treatment. The company, however, has said that access to the treatment would be extremely limited at first, with only enough doses for 50,000 patients.

The president’s true condition is unclear. The White House doctor overseeing his care, Dr. Sean P. Conley, has admitted that he misled the public when Mr. Trump was hospitalized at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

In the televised interview, Dr. Fauci said it was known that a Covid-19 patient can feel good one day and go downhill quickly the next.

“The chances of that happening? I don’t know,” Dr. Fauci said of Mr. Trump’s case. “As good as he looks, I don’t think that’s going to happen, but I don’t know.”

Earlier in the week, in a virtual event for Cornell University, his alma mater, Dr. Fauci spoke about the dangers of sending the public conflicting signals on important health issues like new treatments for Covid-19.

“I try to, the best of my ability, in being very consistent in my messaging based on facts and scientific data,” Dr. Fauci said, according to The Cornell Daily Sun. “But when there are mixed messages coming out of any institution, including the federal government, there is confusion as to what people should do.”

He added, “Personally contradicting the president of the United States publicly is not a good thing if I want to get my job done.”